The US, the UK, and the corrupt pro-Western government of Pakistan got what they deserved!
Author: Arif Hasan Khan Akhundzade, an analyst on regional issues, member of the Sangar Advisory Council
It is amply evident that the Pakistani pro-Western neocolonial elitist order is soon going to collapse. It is under attack from all sides and faces ruin. After the government yesterday increased the prices of petroleum products on instructions from the IMF by about 20% there was a shortage of fuel at pumping stations in Peshawar these days. They are rationing it. The same is with electricity. Yet reliable news reports tell us that despite the paucity of Dollars, Pakistan continues to import luxury cars...old habits evidently die hard.
On the afternoon of last Tuesday in Peshawar, the TTP struck terror into the heart of the regime when it detonated a bomb in a full mosque inside of an area with the highest security protocols. One assumes that their objective in doing this was to send a message to the regime that they have insiders and operatives positioned at all levels of security clearance -- and they can therefore operate with impunity and when and where they please.
It should not be forgotten that these Taliban were the creation of Pakistan's state security apparatus which used them to implement its flawed and ill-conceived "national security paradigm" before they turned on their own corrupt masters. It was only a few months ago when cocky Pakistani propaganda activists and "analysts" were vociferously celebrating the fall of Kabul and its American puppet Ashraf Ghani regime -- to the Taliban, on the social media. After all they have done to themselves, their country and others over the past forty years, they cannot expect to get away cleanly and lightly and without blame. Let them face it now. The time has finally come, and denial and bluffing will no longer serve them.
Many people will interpret the Pakistani predicament from different angles as per the level of their comprehension or the furtherance of their vested interest in the matter. But it is clear that the time has finally come for the phenomenon called Pakistan to be judged and its truths to be laid bare.
Pakistan was a dubious venture from its very beginning. It is opposed to what is expected from the standard model of national-statehood dispensation – created on the basis of a solid ethnic identity, and existing for the good of the common citizen… Pakistan is instead an unnatural agglomeration of disjointed territories culled from the north-western geography of the former British Indian Empire and detached by Anglo-American global interests after World War2 to serve as the pivot of their mischief against the Soviet Union in South Asia and the Middle East. As such, it has no singular ethnic basis, nor does it serve the common interest of its ordinary population. It is a state contrived to be run by an exclusive parasitic bourgeois elite – financially, technologically, and culturally supported by the West, while the rest of its assorted population lives in primitive tribal-cum-feudal squalor at the levels of subsistence. Most areas still lack electricity, roads, health and education, and other basic government facilities – with the bare minimum of administrative representation which is corrupt and lacking in proper means.
Pakistan’s corrupt political and civil-military ruling elite was tasked by its Anglo-American masters with carrying out Western Cold War “duties”. The last of these was the CIA’s Afghan Jihad against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan’s Saur Revolution of the 1980s, followed by the pipeline geopolitical intrigues of the Neoliberal era which saw the creation of the Taliban in 1994. Both of these were part of a “Great Game” which had originated with British imperial fears of the expanding Russian Empire 200 years ago. But these last actions of the Anglo-American global order encountered their first major setback with the incident of 11 September 2001. For the next two decades America and Pakistan were left to contend with the consequences of the criminal mess of their own orchestration. Even during this period they left no stone unturned in trying to prosecute their original noxious intentions regarding others in this region. However the Anglo-American international financial and political system which sustained Pakistan is now coming undone globally, as a result of which Pakistan is also facing utter ruin and collapse. Pakistan has avoided recent friendly and supportive strategic overtures by Russia and China – as it will not be able to enjoy the same servile relationship with them in the manner that it did with its Anglo-American lords.
Put simply, America has abandoned Pakistan to its miserable fate and no longer sees the need to sustain this entity any longer – which is anyway corrupt and diseased beyond cure. In KP Province at least, it appears that this vacuum will eventually be filled in and dominated by the TTP.
